NVIDIA announced on Wednesday that it had formed an alliance with Ubisoft to collaborate on Ubisoft's upcoming PC game titles (coming this fall). The alliance involves the NVIDIA Developer Technology Team "working closely" with the Ubisoft development studio on several new PC titles. The team NVIDIA-enhanced PC games covered by this new alliance includes Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, and Watch Dogs.

NVIDIA Senior VP of Content and Technology Tony Tamasi stated in a press release that "Ubisoft understands that PC gamers demand a truly elite experience -- the best resolutions, the smoothest frame rates and the latest gaming breakthroughs." NVIDIA has reportedly worked with the Ubisoft game developers throughout the entire development process to incorporate the company's graphics technologies.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist is the first game to come out of the alliance. It features PC gaming graphics technologies such as DirectX 11 effects, parallax mapping, ambient occlusion, tessellation, HBAO+ (horizon-based ambient occlusion), and NVIDIA's own TXAA and Surround support. The latest Splinter Cell game also comes bundled with NVIDIA graphics cards.

NVIDIA did not go into details on what sort of extra PC-centric graphics features the other Ubisoft games will have, but it should be similar to those in Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Curiously, the press release makes no mention of NVIDIA's The Way It's Meant To Be Played program, though it seems that this alliance may even go a step further than that in terms of development team interaction and shared resources.

Haswell and Kepler

With the release of Intel's Haswell core processors and the updated graphics card lineup from NVIDIA, Digital Storm has updated many of their custom PC lines to include both. A little while ago the company sent along a pre-built Ode system that includes some impressive hardware like an overclocked Core i7-4770K and a GTX 780 along with a Corsair SSD and more. Even though the design is using fully off-the-shelf parts, the build quality is impressive and will interest many users that want the jump start of a ready made rig.

Our article today (and embedded video) will give you a quick overview of the hardware, the build and the performance that you can expect for this $2500 PC.

The Ode from Digital Storm is built around the Corsair 600T chassis, an older design that still stands up well in terms of looks and performance. The only draw back to it is that it does not have an internal USB 3.0 header and thus still uses the external cable to plug into the back of the motherboard. If you want to see video from 2010 we did of this case, check the way back machine to do so!

A white color scheme really makes this system stand out and the window on the side panel will let everyone gawk at the components included inside. With plenty of room for fans, radiators and good intake filter support throughout, the 600T remains one of our favorite chassis at PC Perspective.

SIGGRAPH 2013 is wrapping up in the next couple of days but, now that NVIDIA removed the veil surrounding Mobile Kepler, people are chatting about what is to follow Tegra 4. Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, contributed to NVIDIA Blogs the number of ways that certain attendees can experience Unreal Engine 4 at the show. As it turns out, NVIDIA engineers have displayed the engine both on Mobile Kepler as well as behind closed doors on desktop PCs.

Not from SIGGRAPH, this is a leak from, I believe, GTC late last March.

Also, this is Battlefield 3, not Unreal Engine 4.

Tim, obviously taking the developer standpoint, is very excited about OpenGL 4.3 support within the mobile GPU. In all, he did not say too much of note. They are targeting Unreal Engine 4 at a broad range of platforms: mobile, desktop, console, and, while absent from this editorial, web standards. Each of these platforms are settling on the same set of features, albeit with huge gaps in performance, allowing developers to focus on a scale of performance instead of a flowchart of capabilities.

Unfortunately for us, there have yet to be leaks from the trade show. We will keep you up-to-date if we find any, however.

NVIDIA Finally Gets Serious with Tegra

Tegra has had an interesting run of things. The original Tegra 1 was utilized only by Microsoft with Zune. Tegra 2 had a better adoption, but did not produce the design wins to propel NVIDIA to a leadership position in cell phones and tablets. Tegra 3 found a spot in Microsoft’s Surface, but that has turned out to be a far more bitter experience than expected. Tegra 4 so far has been integrated into a handful of products and is being featured in NVIDIA’s upcoming Shield product. It also hit some production snags that made it later to market than expected.

I think the primary issue with the first three generations of products is pretty simple. There was a distinct lack of differentiation from the other ARM based products around. Yes, NVIDIA brought their graphics prowess to the market, but never in a form that distanced itself adequately from the competition. Tegra 2 boasted GeForce based graphics, but we did not find out until later that it was comprised of basically four pixel shaders and four vertex shaders that had more in common with the GeForce 7800/7900 series than it did with any of the modern unified architectures of the time. Tegra 3 boasted a big graphical boost, but it was in the form of doubling the pixel shader units and leaving the vertex units alone.

While NVIDIA had very strong developer relations and a leg up on the competition in terms of software support, it was never enough to propel Tegra beyond a handful of devices. NVIDIA is trying to rectify that with Tegra 4 and the 72 shader units that it contains (still divided between pixel and vertex units). Tegra 4 is not perfect in that it is late to market and the GPU is not OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant. ARM, Imagination Technologies, and Qualcomm are offering new graphics processing units that are not only OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant, but also offer OpenCL 1.1 support. Tegra 4 does not support OpenCL. In fact, it does not support NVIDIA’s in-house CUDA. Ouch.

Jumping into a new market is not an easy thing, and invariably mistakes will be made. NVIDIA worked hard to make a solid foundation with their products, and certainly they had to learn to walk before they could run. Unfortunately, running effectively entails having design wins due to outstanding features, performance, and power consumption. NVIDIA was really only average in all of those areas. NVIDIA is hoping to change that. Their first salvo into offering a product that offers features and support that is a step above the competition is what we are talking about today.

There have been rumors of a new mid-range Kepler-based graphics card coming that will be next entry in the GTX 700-series. This new GPU is rumored to be called the GeForce GTX 760. If the specifications are true, the card will fit between the existing GTX 660 and GTX 660 Ti graphics cards as far as hardware specifications and pricing. While it will be under the GTX 700-series, it will not have the faster 7Gbps memory clockspeed of the other 700-series cards.

As far as specifications, Videocardz claims to have the final specifications list in a recent news post. The GTX 760 is rumored to be the latest graphics card to use NVIDIA's GK-104 "Kepler" GPU. The GTX 760 will have some units disabled for a GPU with 1,152 CUDA cores, 96 Texture Manipulation Units (TMUs), and 32 Raster Operations Processors (ROPs). The GPU supports NVIDIA's latest GPU Boost 2.0 technology which will automatically ratchet up the Boost clockspeed so long as temperature allows. It has a base clockspeed of 980 MHz and a boost clockspeed of 1,033 Mhz.

GTX 760 graphics cards will allegedly come in both 2GB and 4GB GDDR5 memory flavors. NVIDIA is clocking the memory at 6 Gbps (1502 MHz), which makes it the fist 700-series part to not take advantage of faster memory chips. However, there is a bit of saving grace as NVIDIA has moved to a 256-bit memory bus. This allows the card to still see a respectable bump in memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s on the GTX 760 versus the GTX 660/GTX 660 Ti's 144.2 GB/s bandwidth.

Compared to the existing mid-range 600-series cards, the GTX 760 has base and boost GPU clockspeeds equal to the GTX 660 (and faster than the GTX 660 TI). Memory clockspeed is also unchanged on the new card, though it has a wider memory bus. The GTX 760 has 192 more CUDA cores than the GTX 660, but 192 fewer CUDA cores versus the GTX 660 Ti. TMUs are also sit evenly between the two 600-series cards, but the GTX 760 does have 8 more ROPs enabled than both the 660 and 660 Ti.

Graphics cards with the upcoming GTX 760 GPU will be powered by two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors, and it has a 170W TDP. That power consumption puts the card between the 150W GTX 660 Ti and the higher-end 230W GTX 770. It appears that the card will not come with the high-end stock metallic cooler used in the other 700-series cards, though the various AIBs are likely to fit the GPU with their own custom aftermarket coolers. Video outputs on the cards will incluce DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI, and DisplayPort.

The chart below compares the specifications between the GTX 660, GTX 660 Ti, GTX 770, and the rumored GTX 760.

GTX 760

GTX 660

GTX 660 Ti

GTX 770

CUDA Cores

1,152

960

1,344

1536

TMUs

96

80

112

128

ROPs

32

24

24

32

GPU Base

980 MHz

980 Mhz

915 Mhz

1046 Mhz

GPU Boost

1033 MHz

1033 MHz

980 Mhz

1085 MHz

Memory Bus

256-bit

192-bit

192-bit

256-bit

Memory Clock

1502 MHz

1502 MHx

1502 Mhz

1752 Mhz

Bandwidth

192 GB/s

144.2 GB/s

144.2 GB/s

224 GB/s

TDP

170 W

140 W

150 W

230 W

Architecture

GK-104

GK-106

GK-104

GK-104

The card is supposedly going to be released on June 25th for around $300. It will compete with AMD's 7950 with boost graphics card. Further, the card will be an alternative to NVIDIA's own GTX 660 Ti and an upgrade for gamers still running GTX 560 cards with the company's older Fermi-based GPU.

Yesterday we all saw the blog piece from NVIDIA that stated that they were going to start licensing their IP to interested third parties. Obviously, there was a lot of discussion about this particular move. Some were in favor, some were opposed, and others yet thought that NVIDIA is now simply roadkill. I believe that it is an interesting move, but we are not yet sure of the exact details or the repercussions of such a decision on NVIDIA’s part.

The biggest bombshell of the entire post was that NVIDIA would be licensing out their latest architecture to interested clients. The Kepler architecture powers the very latest GTX 700 series of cards and at the top end it is considered one of the fastest and most efficient architectures out there. Seemingly, there is a price for this though. Time to dig a little deeper.

Kepler will be the first technology licensed to third party manufacturers. We will not see full GPUs, these will only be integrated into mobile products.

The very latest Tegra parts from NVIDIA do not feature the Kepler architecture for the graphics portion. Instead, the units featured in Tegra can almost be described as GeForce 7000 series parts. The computational units are split between pixel shaders and vertex shaders. They support a maximum compatibility of D3D 9_3 and OpenGL ES 2.0. This is a far cry from a unified shader architecture and support for the latest D3D 11 and OpenGL ES 3.0 specifications. Other mobile units feature the latest Mali and Adreno series of graphics units which are unified and support DX11 and OpenGL ES 3.0.

So why exactly does the latest Tegras not share the Kepler architecture? Hard to say. It could be a variety of factors that include time to market, available engineering teams, and simulations which could dictate if power and performance can be better served by a less complex unit. Kepler is not simple. A Kepler unit that occupies the same die space could potentially consume more power with any given workload, or conversely it could perform poorly given the same power envelope.

We can look at the desktop side of this argument for some kind of proof. At the top end Kepler is a champ. The GTX 680/770 has outstanding performance and consumes far less power than the competition from AMD. When we move down a notch and see the GTX 660 Ti/HD 7800 series of cards, we see much greater parity in performance and power consumptions. Going to the HD 7790 as compared to the 650 Ti Boost, we see the Boost part have slightly better performance but consumes significantly more power. Then we move down to the 650 and 650 Ti and these parts do not consume any more power than the competing AMD parts, but they also perform much more poorly. I know these are some pretty hefty generalizations and the engineers at NVIDIA could very effectively port Kepler over to mobile applications without significant performance or power penalties. But so far, we have not seen this work.

Power, performance, and die area aside there is also another issue to factor in. NVIDIA just announced that they are doing this. We have no idea how long this effort has been going, but it is very likely that it has only been worked on for the past six months. In that time NVIDIA needs to hammer out how they are going to license the technology, how much manpower they must provide licensees to get those parts up and running, and what kind of fees they are going to charge. There is a lot of work going on there and this is not a simple undertaking.

So let us assume that some three months ago an interested partner such as Rockchip or Samsung comes knocking to NVIDIA’s door. They work out the licensing agreements and this takes several months. Then we start to see the transfer of technology between the companies. Obviously Samsung and Rockchip are not going to apply this graphics architecture to currently shipping products, but will instead bundle it in with a next generation ARM based design. These designs are not spun out overnight. For example, the 64 bit ARMv8 designs have been finalized for around a year, and we do not expect to see initial parts being shipped until late 1H 2014. So any partner that decides to utilize NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture for such an application will not see this part be released until 1H 2015 at the very earliest.

Sheild is still based on a GPU posessing separate pixel and vertex shaders. DX11 and OpenGL ES 3.0? Nope!

If someone decides to license this technology from NVIDIA, it will not be of great concern. The next generation of NVIDIA graphics will already be out by that time, and we could very well be approaching the next iteration for the desktop side. NVIDIA plans on releasing a Kepler based mobile unit in 2014 (Logan), which would be a full year in advance of any competing product. In 2015 NVIDIA is planning on releasing an ARM product based on the Denver CPU and Maxwell GPU. So we can easily see that NVIDIA will only be licensing out an older generation product so it will not face direct competition when it comes to GPUs. NVIDIA obviously is hoping that their GPU tech will still be a step ahead of that of ARM (Mali), Qualcomm (Adreno), and Imagination Technologies (PowerVR).

This is an easy and relatively painfree way to test the waters that ARM, Imagination Technologies, and AMD are already treading. ARM only licenses IP and have shown the world that it can not only succeed at it, but thrive. Imagination Tech used to produce their own chips much like NVIDIA does, but they changed direction and continue to be profitable. AMD recently opened up about their semi-custom design group that will design specific products for customers and then license those designs out. I do not think this is a desperation move by NVIDIA, but it certainly is one that probably is a little late in coming. The mobile market is exploding, and we are approaching a time where nearly every electricity based item will have some kind of logic included in it, billions of chips a year will be sold. NVIDIA obviously wants a piece of that market. Even a small piece of “billions” is going to be significant to the bottom line.

Kepler-based Mobile GPUs

Late last month, just before the tech world blew up from the mess that is Computex, NVIDIA announced a new line of mobility discrete graphics parts under the GTX 700M series label. At the time we simply posted some news and specifications about the new products but left performance evaluation for a later time. Today we have that for the highest end offering, the GeForce GTX 780M.

As with most mobility GPU releases it seems, the GTX 700M series is not really a new GPU and only offers cursory feature improvements. Based completely on the Kepler line of parts, the GTX 700M will range from 1536 CUDA cores on the GTX 780M to 768 cores on the GTX 760M.

The flagship GTX 780M is essentially a desktop GTX 680 card in a mobile form factor with lower clock speeds. With 1536 CUDA cores running at 823 MHz and boosting to higher speeds depending on the notebook configuration, a 256-bit memory controller running at 5 GHz, the GTX 780M will likely be the fastest mobile GPU you can buy. (And we’ll be testing that in the coming pages.)

The GTX 760M, 765M and 770M offering ranges of performance that scale down to 768 cores at 657 MHz. NVIDIA claims we’ll see the GTX 760M in systems as small as 14-in and below with weights at 2kg or so from vendors like MSI and Acer. For Ultrabooks and thinner machines you’ll have to step down to smaller, less power hungry GPUs like the GT 750 and 740 but even then we expect NVIDIA to have much faster gaming performance than the Haswell-based processor graphics.